News and Insight for Sales Leaders by Gerhard Gschwandtner

09/17/2013

Take Time to Coach Your Reps to Success

Today's blog post is by Keith Rosen, CEO of Profit Builders, a globally recognized authority on sales and leadership and the pioneer of management coach training. Keith has
written several best sellers on time management, cold calling and closing the
sale, including the globally acclaimedCoaching
Salespeople into Sales Champions, winner of Five International Best
Book Awards and rated the #1 book on sales coaching.

Keith Rosen recently wrote an interesting blog
post, "Coaching
Questions that Work in Any Conversation." One of the points he makes is
that sales managers frequently express concern that coaching takes time. In
some cases, they fear that taking time to stop and coach the rep might actually
endanger the deal. In other cases, managers might feel overwhelmed by management
tasks in general. With all the other things on their plate, why add a laborious
coaching conversation to the list?

Whatever the cause, many sales managers simply
take the route of telling reps what to do rather than taking time out for a
coaching conversation. The instinct to issue directives is natural, but
counterproductive. In the end, taking time to coach will actually reap more
positive benefits for you and your sales reps. As Rosen says:

In every conversation
where something needs to be resolved, especially with your customers and direct
reports, you always need to know at least three things.

1. What's going on?

2. Why is this happening? (Assess in order to uncover and identify the root cause rather than treat
symptoms, which leads to repetitive conversations.)

3. How can you create a new
outcome/possibility?

These three questions
provide you with the bare-bone basic facts you need to understand any situation
before moving into problem solving mode.

I recommend you read Rosen's expert
list of coaching questions -- these can help guide you through almost any
type of coaching conversation with reps so you can co-create success together.